Lexicography ASIALEX (2014) 1:185–187
DOI 10.1007/s40607-015-0013-8
BOOK REVIEW
Rufus H. Gouws, Ulrich Heid, Wolfgang Schweickard
and Herbert Ernst Wiegand (eds.) Dictionaries.
An International Encyclopedia of Lexicography.
Supplementary Volume: Recent Developments
with Focus on Electronic and Computational
Lexicography (HSK Vol. 5.4). Berlin: De Gruyter
Mouton, 2013. XIII + 1,579 pp. € 499, US $ 699 ISBN
978-3-11-023812-9
Reinhard Hartmann
Published online: 24 February 2015
Ó Springer Berlin Heidelberg 2015
A welcome arrival is the follow-up volume 5.4 of the authoritative encyclopedia
Wörterbücher/Dictionaries/Dictionnaires which was first published in three
volumes (5.1 in 1989, 5.2 in 1990 and 5.3 in 1991) as part of the international
series Handbücher zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft, of which 38 titles
have appeared so far on subjects like linguistics, semantics, LSP, terminology and
translation.1
How does this encyclopedia of lexicography manage to deal with our
complicated field—not only to supplement the three volumes published more than
20 years ago, but also to report on recent developments in computing? The task was
taken on by scholars well-known for their achievements in promoting the study of
lexicography, but as we shall see, this was quite a difficult task to achieve.
The material is presented in the form of articles, which are subdivided into
numbered sections and sub-sections, each with an outline and a list of
bibliographical references and many with numbered dictionary ‘‘extracts’’,
‘‘entries’’, ‘‘definitions’’ and ‘‘examples’’ as well as illustrative figures and tables
(although their marking with these titles is not always consistent). The 110 articles
are grouped into 20 chapters (see below).
The Preface provides the historical background from 1989–91 to 2012 and
outlines the contents of this supplementary volume, which must have been an ever1
This volume and some others are available from Walter de Gruyter GmbH as ebooks: see http://www.
degruyter.com/browse?t1=SK-12-01.
R. Hartmann (&)
40 Velwell Road, Exeter, UK
e-mail: R.R.K.Hartmann@exeter.ac.uk
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Lexicography ASIALEX (2014) 1:185–187
growing and overpowering project, as it has involved 110 authors from 21 different
countries. There is no direct relation between the identical number (110) of articles
and authors, as some have collaborated with others and several have supplied more
than one article.2 These relationships must have provided complex and at times even
irritable editorial duties, as most authors had to be given intensive guidance and
allowed mutual concessions. Some of these problems are mentioned by the editors
in the Preface, such as their decision this time to offer the text of the whole book
through the medium of English. The help of a range of editorial assistants,
proofreaders, translators, illustrators and indexers is also acknowledged by them.
All this must have meant considerable challenges, and does explain the long delay
in production of the volume.
As lexicography is still a relatively young academic discipline, it must have been
extremely difficult for the editors to decide which aspects to concentrate on, how to
arrange them in groups of chapters, and which to ignore. The main topics selected
are:
1.
2.
3.
New developments in lexicographic theory (or ‘‘metalexicography’’), Articles
1–36 in Chapters I to VI;
New developments in the dictionary-making process representing various
languages, Articles 37–64 in Chapters VII to XII; and
New developments in computational lexicography, Articles 65–110 in Chapters
XIII to XX.
A full list of the 20 chapters is available to readers of this review in the form of
an informative table of contents, together with an outline of each of the 110 articles
as well as extracts of them, on the publisher’s website.3
The first group of topics (Chapters I to VI) includes two introductory articles, by
the editors themselves, on dictionaries in modern society and on the impact of
computational techniques. The latter have not only grown profusely as part of NLP,
since the first three volumes, but have also been applied in a number of ways, for
e.g. corpus collection and for developing new types of electronic dictionaries for
human use. This is followed by five chapters on the relevance of lexicographic
theory and management. One of these (Article 3 in Chapter II) stands out as an
important overview of the various ways in which information is selected and
located, searched and found in dictionaries, in terms of such underlying features as
‘‘macrostructures’’, ‘‘access structures’’, ‘‘microstructures’’ and ‘‘mediostructures’’.
How all this affects the textual architecture of dictionary entries is discussed in
Articles 4–10 in Chapter II, exploring the ways in which the organizational
complexity of dictionaries can be represented. Unfortunately, readers may find this
survey rather hard to absorb as this topic is inherently enigmatic, complicated by
many theoretical innovations and terminological ambiguities as well as by literal
2
I have myself contributed 3 articles to Volumes 5.1 and 5.3 and another 3 to Volume 5.4.
3
http://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/175228.
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Lexicography ASIALEX (2014) 1:185–187
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(German-to-English) translations and abstract diagrammatic illustrations (some
based on models borrowed from mathematical set theory).
These structure-oriented contributions are followed by 9 articles in Chapter III on
‘‘dictionary typology’’, including useful descriptions of various general, learner’s
and special-purpose as well as electronic dictionaries, the treatment of selected
dictionary subjects such as collocations and culture-bound items (6 articles in
Chapter IV), research on dictionary production and use (6 articles in Chapter V),
and lexicographic training, dictionary criticism and metalexicographic organization
(5 articles in Chapter VI).
The second group of topics (Chapters VII to XII) traces the lexicographic
traditions in various language families, ranging from articles on the ancient
languages of the Near East and Greek and Latin to articles on Romance, Germanic
and Slavic languages, on Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and on languages
in Africa. They constitute very useful although rather diverse summaries, some of
which report on massive developments since their treatment in Volumes 5.1–5.3.
For example, Article 49 on German synchronic lexicography gives the most
impressive description of more than 200 dictionaries, supported by useful
illustrations and comparisons (other languages such as English, French and Chinese
are not as well documented).
The third group of topics (Chapters XIII to XX) begins with the history of
computational lexicography and corpus linguistics, then treats the typology of
electronic dictionaries (divided between articles on interactive or ‘‘human use’’,
including internet dictionaries, dictionary portals, pedagogical dictionaries and
electronic encyclopedias, and articles on NLP or ‘‘machine use’’, including speech
recognition and synthesis, text mining, database searches and machine-aided
translation). Further articles discuss models for the representation of dictionaries
(the ‘‘form aspect’’, including formalisms for electronic dictionary resources);
models for the representation of linguistic data (the ‘‘content aspect’’, including
codes for syntactic and semantic properties); computer-based dictionary-making
with the aid of corpora and other tools; and finally, the computational aspects of
terminology and terminography.
Most apparent and some unresolved issues raised in the original three volumes
are addressed here, including tensions between human and machine use, lexicographic compilation practice and metalexicographic theory, and production versus
use, for e.g. the ‘‘user perspective’’.4 Many disciplinary and terminological
questions are answered, for e.g. what terms might be appropriate to designate our
(widened) field, such as ‘‘reference science’’. All the material in this encyclopedia is
well collected, coordinated and presented, supported by the two indexes of subjects
and names. After examining it in detail, I conclude that this book is a valuable
addition to any library of essential sources of knowledge on the subject of
lexicography.
4
The User in Focus is the sub-title of the Proceedings of the XVI EURALEX International Congress,
which has recently been made available to readers anywhere, allowing them to download the content of
the whole volume from http://www.euralex.org/proceedings-toc/euralex_2014/. A significant proportion
of the papers were actually assessed by a panel of experts who had been editors or authors of the
Dictionaries volume reviewed here.
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